Exploiting Interference for Energy Harvesting: A Survey, Research Issues, and Challenges

Interference is one of the fundamental aspects that makes wireless communication challenging, which has attracted great research attention for decades. To solve this interference problem, many interference management (IM) techniques have been developed. Nevertheless, interference can also provide some benefits to wireless networks if it is properly utilized according to the latest research advances. Wireless signal can carry information as well as energy, and thus the redundant resource of interference can be exploited using energy harvesting (EH) to provide the power to support the operation of wireless nodes. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the research works of exploiting interference for wireless EH. Some fundamental aspects are first reviewed, including the receiver architecture, antenna dimension, network topology, and IM techniques, for wireless EH systems that exploit interference. Then, two IM techniques for wireless EH, beamforming optimization and interference alignment, are discussed in detail. In addition, several research issues are also presented, including the adversarial jamming signal and artificial noise for EH. Finally, some research challenges of exploiting interference for wireless EH are discussed.